Ingredients of Reality

Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare Street New York, NY 10012 United States

Lan Tuazon, Army Park and Parking Lot Landscape, 2010. Courtesy of the artist

February 29 – April 7 2012

Opening Reception: February 28, 7-9pm

Press Release:

Ingredients of Reality: the Dismantling of New York City by Lan Tuazon presents sculptures, drawings and prints that discuss how history, the law and class structures are written on the physical environment. Surrealist in concept, Tuazon takes real/existing parts of the built environment — including buildings, lots, and monuments – and creates a new reality against the repressive logic of property. The exhibition includes the presentation of two new works: Architectures of Defense and New York City Bar Graph, which paired with Tuazon’s Army Park and Parking Lot Landscape, present the city disassembled into parts and functions unveiling taxonomies of power reordered into new composite figures that render visible what reality has ceased to distinguish.

Isolating how space is demarcated, Architectures of Defense is made with concentric and cascading layers of wrought iron fences that demonstrate ornaments of power and property. The demarcating lines that create spaces of difference, in and out, here and there, is essentially what characterizes an exclusionary definition of an “us” and “them.” New York City Bar Graph is a taxonomy of over 120 models of notable skyscrapers categorized by function: civic, corporate, hotel, luxury residence, public housing & utilities, media, office, and world banks. Arranged in bar graph shelves, the piece takes stock in what types of structures are built in NYC to assess the scale and quantity of prioritized functions. Taking order as a primary mode of meaning and visualizing how current land use can be re-conceived as a raw material landscape Parking Lot Landmass is an island and topographical landscape made from all existing parking lots in the city. Parking Lot Landscape is accompanied by four woodblock print studies showing the arrangement of unmarked territories of the island. With similar organizational intent, Army Park is an ink drawing of a public park proposal that brings together statues of heroes on horseback that exist throughout Manhattan, uniting the figures into a singular army placed in front of and charging towards the Downtown Civic Center.

About the Artist
Lan Tuazon, b. 1976 in the Philippine Islands, lives and works in New York whether she likes it or not. She is Lan Tuazon twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.